Abstract
As I said in the introduction, I do not intend in this book to add to the existing literature on positivist philosophies of science. We need, however, to look at them briefly in order to set the scene for the growth of the hermeneutic, critical and realist alternatives. One of the best recent books on positivism distinguishes no fewer than twelve senses of the term.1 For present purposes, however, we can get by with three variants.
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References
Halfpenny, Positivism and Sociology.
H. T. Buckle, History of Civilisation in England, vol. 1, ch. 1 (London: 1899) (1st edn 1857).
William Outhwaite, Understanding Social Life, 2nd edn (Lewes: Jean Stroud, 1986) ch. 2 and passim.
Outhwaite, ‘Laws and Explanations in Sociology’.
Otto Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973).
A typical example is Richard Rudner, The Philosophy of Social Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966).
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959), p. 59.
C. G. Hempel, ‘The Function of General Laws in History’, Journal of Philosophy vol. 39, 1942, pp. 35–48; reprinted in P. Gardiner (ed.), Theories of History (New York: Free Press, 1959), pp. 344–56.
Hempel, ‘The Function of General Laws in History’, in Gardiner (ed.), Theories of History, p. 352.
Ibid., pp. 349 f.
Michael Scriven, ‘Truisms as the Grounds for Historical Explanations’, p. 448, in Gardiner, Theories of History, pp. 443–75.
Ibid., p. 454.
Edmund Mokrzycki, Philosophy of Science and Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 65.
Ibid., p. 4.
See William Outhwaite, Concept Formation in Social Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), especially p. 6.
Martin Hollis and Edward Nell, Rational Economic Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
Outhwaite, Concept Formation in Social Science.
Alfred Schutz, ‘Choice and the Social Sciences’, in L. Embree (ed.), Life World and Consciousness (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), especially p. 583. Cf. Outhwaite, Concept Formation, p. 65; Richard Grathoff (ed.), The Theory of Social Action (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1978).
Peter Winch: The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), p. 123.
Karl-Otto Apel, A nalytic Philosophy of Language and the Geisteswissenschaften (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1967), p. 2.
See John Thompson, Critical Hermeneutics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (London: Heinemann, 1971).
T. Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1976); Anthony Giddens (ed.), Positivism and Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1974).
T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 118.
Alisdair MacIntyre, The Unconscious. A Conceptual Analysis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).
Karl Popper, ‘Normal Science and its Dangers’, in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 52.
Ibid., p. 57.
Mary Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963); The Structure of Scientific Inference (London: Macmillan, 1974).
R. Harré and E. H. Madden, Causal Powers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975).
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© 1987 William Outhwaite
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Outhwaite, W. (1987). Philosophies of Social Science: The Old and the New. In: New Philosophies of Social Science. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18946-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18946-5_2
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